 So in class today we're going to continue on our research on Alberta's natural region. Remember you've got your region that you're researching and we have access to the Alberta Naturally website. You may want to read together with a partner or you may want to use text-to-speech to listen to the text as you go. In my classroom I make use of a text-to-speech software that allows the students to highlight text and then hear it if they can't read it themselves. We have a site license, we've put it on every device that we have in the school including our teacher desktops and it's simply an icon that the students open up. It brings up a small box in the corner of the screen for them and as they're bringing up either a PDF of a text book or they're on a website they can simply take their cursor, highlight a chunk of text, click the read button and as long as they have a headset in or they've got their laptop speakers turned on it will then read the text to them aloud. I was on a website with lots of words and I highlight a bit of the words and I press the button that said read and I read it all for me. A lot of kids who have trouble decoding like to use text-to-speech because listening to it is much easier than having for them to labor and reading and trying to decode where they often just focus on decoding and they're not comprehending. Reading the social text book with the tool is way easier than reading it without because I'm not that strong of a reader. In our classrooms I feel that learner preference is a big driver of how we teach because our students need to be motivated and engaged so if they have access to a variety of tools and a variety of strategies and they get to select and choose the ones that either work best for them to help them with their learning and remove barriers or they just like using they're going to be motivated in the lesson. Technology has really helped to engage a lot of our students because they're able to work more independently so they're students who often had to wait for an adult to come to them or be waiting with their hand up or waiting to ask a friend or get frustrated so I find that having the technology in the classroom they're able to get to work more independently and they're able to take ownership of their learning so I find that the students are really motivated they're feeling confident in their learning and are proud of their learning they want to bring their parents in there can I email that to my mom and kid can I take that home and they're so motivated to come to class and to learn. Another way that I found really helpful for students is in writing so kids would write something and then they can go back and they can highlight what they've written and listen to it for for sense for meaning. I would definitely say that I'm able to be a better teacher because of technology. I have more time to work with students directly. Some of my students that I may have both before had to take the time to scribe for or read to and doing those tasks the technology is able to do that for me so if they need a scribe or they need a reader there's a computer to do that so that means me as a teacher I'm able to sit down and work on concept development so rather than doing a menial task of reading I can sit down with a child and have a discussion with them and figure out are they missing background knowledge do they not understand do they have a misconception and is there something I need to clarify so I find I get to support students in concept development rather than being their secretary. It gives me a lot of confidence to read. It's taught me that reading can be fun not boring.